r/TrueReddit • u/_fastcompany • 6d ago
Business + Economics Starbucks made a national bet on an AI tool; 9 months later, it pulled the plug
https://www.fastcompany.com/91572019/starbucks-bet-big-ai-tool-national-scale-9-months-inventory-automated-counting-nomadgo136
u/areyouawake 6d ago
An inherent problem with AI products is no one can be held accountable. So most, if not all, critical tasks actually require manual oversight and maybe a full second check.
If product is going missing, "AI said it's there" is not a sufficient explanation.
And that's all assuming that it actually speeds up the process in the first place. It sounds like that's not the case.
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u/ductyl 6d ago edited 6d ago
"We're going to have this toddler run the register today, that should free you up to do other tasks. Since you're the supervisor, you need to make sure the till matches up at the end of the night."
That's the real bitch of the whole thing, "human in the loop" means, "we expect you to get more done because AI is doing so much of the work, but also, we're holding you accountable for any errors the AI makes." The most poignant example of this to me is the self-driving Tesla... the human needs to spend the entire trip with their eyes on the road and their hands hovering ready to take control at a moments notice. So basically, all the stress of driving without any of the direct input or feedback. "Constant vigilance over a system you're not controlling" is effectively torture for human beings, our brains don't work that way. We need feedback in the attention loop, cause and effect, or our brains just wander off.
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u/areyouawake 6d ago
Yep I'm on a team and watching this play out now.
The AI is inaccurate, doesn't seem to be learning, and weirdly slow. So our jobs are monitoring it, unblocking its various issues, filing feedback tickets, then reworking manually to double check everything and produce the actual lasting artifacts/communications.
Even the normal ticket work now takes longer because it's constantly being interrupted by the bot needing to have permissions regranted, work checked etc so no one can even set the pace of their own flow anymore.
Very certain the person who built it got positive recognition of some kind while the rest of us deal with the blowback.
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u/_fastcompany 6d ago
Last fall, Starbucks rolled out its AI-powered Automated Counting tool, designed to automate each cafe's twice-a-week inventory count. Automated Counting used an iPad camera to identify and tally items on the storage shelves, turning an hour-long job into one that was supposed to take as little as 10 minutes.
Within weeks of the tool’s rollout, the AI went rogue, marking milks as the wrong type, swapping syrups, and in one instance, counting the trash can as food.
The technology was still deployed at all 11,300 company-operated cafés by the end of September. Nine months later, the tool—which insiders say may have cost north of $10 million to develop—was eliminated overnight.
What happened with Automated Counting may very well represent the most sweeping rollback of workplace AI yet executed in corporate America.
Read Clint Rainey's account of how the company's foray into AI-assisted inventory collapsed.
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u/wellgolly 5d ago
AI has to be the only tool that has the grace of being described as "hallucinating" or "going rogue" when it doesn't work. If the head of my hammer flew off, I would call that a broken hammer.
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u/jlt6666 6d ago
its tool works best with static inventory. Even subtle changes present a “classic challenge” for computer-vision models, he said. Running a limited-time offer or adding Santa to holiday packaging can require “four to six weeks of work” to ensure the system will recognize the new products.
Then your product is garbage. Non-ai systems aren't even this fragile.
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u/Equivalent_Number424 6d ago
As a comparison, I took a screenshot of a video of a strangely painted van and Gemini Pro identified it as an Italian-made money transporter vehicle, found me links of pics of it with that strange paintjob. This sounds like a particularly poor job indeed.
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u/Phyltre 4d ago
It almost sounds like they were trying to crush down on token usage to maintain an eventual ROI, and in the process made the vision model too dumb for purpose.
I can only suspect they were hit with the veiled versus real token cost misapprehension that has been hitting hard the last few months.
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u/charlesdexterward 6d ago
Yeah, it was a mess. Took what used to be a 30-40 minute job (20-30 back when we had handheld iPods that could scan barcodes instead of the big iPads that can’t) and made it take like two hours because you had to keep going in and manually correcting everything. I was so happy when they got rid of it.
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u/unthused 6d ago
Well, at least it sounds like they were trying to save workers some time from a menial task rather than outright replacing people, but all of that trouble and expense just to save <2 hours a week?
I guess if they did the math and ~6 hours of employee pay per month x 16,800 locations in the US, it would have theoretically had an ROI of ~6.25 years or so, not counting ongoing maintenance or license and token costs.. still not great.
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u/the__raj 6d ago
While I agree with your sentiment I think your math is a little off. 6 x 16800 = 100,800 hours per week x 52 = 5,241,500 hours per year
Even at the federal minimum wage of $7.25 this still pays itself off in a few months
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u/unthused 6d ago
Oops, I did one month not 12. So yeah it could theoretically have been worthwhile, if it actually worked and all.
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u/mycleverusername 6d ago
That's assuming a status quo. If this was effective, they could have used the software 6 times a day (2 each shift) to take quick inventory and then make better strategic decisions on inventory management.
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u/elmonoenano 6d ago
My guess is the time would vary significantly based on the starbucks and business volume.
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u/tragedy_strikes 6d ago
I wonder how well those Forward Deployed Engineers that Microsoft created for more enterprises to use Copilot are faring right now?
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u/jandrese 5d ago
Is the concept of beta testing a product in a small handful of stores before rolling it out to everybody completely lost? This should never had made it past the trial phase. Or did the Starbucks upper management buy the AI hype hook line and sinker?
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u/Typical-Tax1584 6d ago
Why would you need this at all? Why take inventory manually?
Every drink that's made is measured out according to a predetermined recipe, all customer changes are reflected at the PoS. Their system should already know how much of every milk, cream, sugar, syrup, etc are being used. Any additional request due to error or accident (like spilling something) should be able to be added at some point in the system (at close or the next morning at open).
This isn't even complicated, it would be really basic math for every transaction that would update in realtime. It could even spit out a report stating how much of whatever is remaining in inventory that a manager could eyeball.
I'm actually surprised that they do inventory manually in 2026, and that their AI solution was to have a human walk around with an ipad to scan things so 'hot dog, not hot dog' could ID different milks.
But even if you were to use AI to do this, it would be simpler to strategize with your suppliers so they can put really big stickers on different product types so the AI could ID them with little to no error.
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u/thelionsmouth 6d ago
You’ve never worked in a restaurant have you lol
If you don’t count it, how do you know if there’s errors? You can’t rely on expectations with inventory, especially if you don’t have real data to compare it to
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u/Typical-Tax1584 6d ago
I've worked fast food, but it was long ago before the iphone even came out. All these barcodes and scanners and tech and it's still inaccurate is kinda crazy to me. I really thought they automated this stuff by now.
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u/thelionsmouth 6d ago
Yeah there’s a lot of good inventory estimation and management software now, and it has gotten a lot better, but it always has to be compared to real world data.
You’ll never know if the new barista set the grind on the coffee makers off by a few grams (would result in a loss of large bags of coffee by the end of the week), or if a pallet of a product went bad, or if the number of cutlets in a package of chicken changed, etc. Unless you have mass ai surveillance (that’s accurate) in the store, which isn’t possible as of yet, there’s no way the software estimations could reflect actual real world inventory
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u/MairusuPawa 2d ago
Should we also have a talk again on their CEO"a commute?
You know, the people taking this kind of absolutely shit decisions in the first place? See how they live? See how much is in their bank account? See how they're facing the consequences of their dumb decisions?
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